Renia's Diary

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  FOREWORD

  In the past four decades, numerous Holocaust survivors have published their memoirs. Some waited to write until they reached an age at which people, in general, are more prone to reflect on the past. Some wrote because they felt the world was now more attuned to listening to what they had to say about this genocide. Others were urged to do so by their children, if not grandchildren. Since the 1980s so many memoirs have been published that it is easy to forget that this desire to “write and record” began far earlier.

  In fact, Holocaust survivors have been writing their memoirs and giving their testimonies since the very end of the war. By the early 1960s, fifteen years after the end of the Holocaust, there were thousands of survivors’ memoirs in print. In 1961, when Elie Wiesel sought an American publisher for Night, which had already been published in French, many rejected it because they believed there were too many memoirs in circulation. In his introduction to the French edition of Night, Nobel Prize winner François Mauriac acknowledged that Wiesel’s was one among a myriad of Holocaust memoirs when he wrote, “this personal record coming as it does after so many others” (emphasis added).* Sadly, with the passing of the generation of survivors, that trend is nearing its end.

  It is sometimes hard to imagine that these recollections, now much treasured and valued, were once eschewed by historians who preferred documents—despite the fact that most of these documents were products of the Third Reich—to personal accounts. These historians worried that personal memories were not as “trustworthy” as documents. Today’s historians recognize the value of these works, particularly when they are juxtaposed with the documentary and material evidence.

  There are, of course, a number of methodological problems entailed in relying on these memoirs and testimonies. They are written ex post facto. Memory is elusive. It is impacted by more contemporary events. An individual’s recollection of an event may be colored by how another person who was also present remembered it. A survivor may recount the details of an event in order to stress a particular point, a point whose importance only became evident to her well after the fact. This is true, of course, with any memoir or testimony. We write to make a point. It is particularly true when the memoir deals with a traumatic event. And what could have been more traumatic than the Holocaust?

  Moreover, memoirs are the voices of those who survived, not those who did not. It was with good reason that David Boder, one of the first scholars to systematically record survivors’ accounts of their experiences, entitled his work I Did Not Interview the Dead. He knew that the voices he recorded were of the ones who survived. The voices and recollections of those who were not lucky enough to endure were, in the main, lost to us forever.

  I write “in the main” because we do have some of the voices of those who perished in the form of diaries such as Renia Spiegel’s. Diaries are different, not only because they allow us to hear the voices of those who did not survive. They are different from memoirs because they do not pose these methodological challenges. Irrespective of whether they were written by someone who survived or someone who did not, they are fundamentally different from memoirs because they are contemporaneous accounts. Simply put, the author of the memoir knows the end of the story. The diarist does not. The diarist may well be unaware of the “bigger” picture of what she is experiencing. For example, is the creation of a ghetto in her town part of a broader policy of ghettoization or just something happening where she is? Whereas the person writing after an event may have a sense of how a particular German decree fit into overall Nazi policy, the diarist generally does not. What may seem to be of relatively little importance to the diarist may, in fact, turn out to be of great significance. And conversely, what may seem utterly traumatic to the diarist may pale in comparison to what will follow.

  Most important, diaries offer us something that memoirs do not: an emotional immediacy. And it is this immediacy that is so very compelling. I am reminded of Hêlène Berr, the Israeli young Parisian woman who kept a diary from 1942 through to the day she and her parents were rounded up in March 1944. Fortuitously, she begins to write but a short time before the decree that all Jews must wear a yellow star. She confides to the diary her struggle with whether to wear it or not. Was wearing it an act of compliance with a hateful regime or did it demonstrate a pride in one’s Jewish identity? We read of her reactions to passersbys’ comments. Some express solidarity and others pity. She reflects on them, not from a distance of many years, but on the day she encountered them. She does not—because she cannot—contextualize this act as the first step in an array of far worse persecution to come.

  In reading Renia Spiegel’s diary, I was also reminded, as will be many readers, of Anne Frank’s iconic work. All three of these diaries—Spiegel’s, Frank’s, and Berr’s—are filled with the seemingly mundane musings of young girls who are transfixed by first loves and filled with hopes for the future. Renia Spiegel’s diary is replete with familiar expressions of teenage angst—first love, first kiss, and jealousies that, in retrospect, may seem meaningless but at the moment seem, at least to Renia, to be momentous. It is also filled with poetry that cannot help but touch the reader.

  We who read her writings are possessed of something she did not have: knowledge of the outcome. At the outset of the diary she is distraught that she has been forced to go live with her grandparents and, therefore, has “no real home.” It makes her “so sad that I have to cry.” Not having a home will pale in comparison to what is to come. Had she written a memoir she would have known that fact and might have flattened this traumatic moment. She does not do so. In 1940, after the fall of Western Europe, she cries, “I’m here on my own, without Mama or Daddy, without a home, poked and laughed at. Oh, God, why did such a horrible birthday have to come? Wouldn’t it be better to die? I look down from the height of my 16 years and I wonder whether I’ll reach the end.” Were she writing a memoir, knowing what was in the offing, she might well have overlooked this moment of despondence. She might not have been so distraught when the luxury of fur clothing was taken from the Jews. “Yesterday coats, furs, collars, oversleeves, hats, boots were being taken away on the street. And now there’s a new regulation that under pain of death it is forbidden to have even a scrap of fur at home.”

  Nor does she know that what may appear to be a terrible fate might, in fact, turn out to be a lifesaver for some victims. She describes the “fear, despair, abandon” experienced by those deported by the Soviets to Birobidzhan* and other parts of the Soviet interior. She is distraught that “they will travel in closed, dark carriages, 50 people in each.… in airless, dirty, infested conditions. They might even be hungry … with children among them dying out.” Ironically, of course, these people had a far better chance of surviving than did those who would subsequently be forced by the Germans to travel in even worse conditions
to an even direr fate.

  Yet this young girl—for that is what she really is—with her dreams for her future, recognizes how the vise is closing in on her and her people. “Ghetto! That word is ringing in our ears, it terrifies, it torments. We don’t know what will happen to us, where we’ll go and what they’ll let us take.” Nonetheless, she continues to hope for the future. This tension between an increasingly bleak reality and optimism about what might still be possible cannot help but break the reader’s heart.

  But a few days before being caught and murdered by the Germans, she senses that the end might be coming. She writes with prescience, “My dear Diary, my good, beloved friend! We went through such terrible times together and now the worst moment is upon us. I could be afraid now. But the One who didn’t leave us then will help us today too. He’ll save us. Hear O, Israel,† save us, help us.” Her prayer was for naught.

  * * *

  Renia Spiegel, a young girl so filled with a zest for life and possessed of an ability to describe in prose and in poetry the beauty of the world around her, was denied with one bullet what she so wanted: a future. But for this diary she would have gone, together with millions of others, into the cruel oblivion that was the fate of most Holocaust victims. Those who saved the diary and those who worked to bring it to print have “rescued” her. They could not save her from a cruel fate, nor could they give her that future she so desired, but they have rescued her from the added pain of having been forgotten.

  —Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Holocaust History at Emory University

  PREFACE

  My sister, Renia Spiegel, was born on June 18, 1924, in Uhryńkowce, in the Tarnopol province in southeastern Poland. This rural town is called Uhrynkivtsi in English, and it is now part of Ukraine. Before World War II ripped apart our family, our people, and our country, Uhryńkowce was in Poland.

  I came along on November 18, 1930, six years after Renia. I was happily married to my Vienna, Austria–born husband, George Bellak, for fifty-three years, taught school in New York City for three decades, and am a happy mother of two and a grandmother to three wonderful boys. My sister only lived to be eighteen. She was murdered by the Nazis in 1942. Along with a few photos, some family heirlooms, and the memories I’ve turned over in my head for almost ninety years, the diary you’re about to read is all I have left of her.

  I couldn’t always face this diary, though. I hid from it and from my past for many years until my daughter, Alexandra Renata, retrieved the diary from the safe-deposit box where it had lain, undisturbed, for over four decades. Realizing what an important work of history and literature it is, and how it could resonate with people around the world, she had it translated into English. She’s still working tirelessly to have it published across the globe, helping to make it known why this story has value, even today. I thank her for bringing it—and my sister’s memory—back to me.

  When I was born, my parents made a stork out of paper, placed it in the window, and told my sister I was coming. By then, my family had moved to an estate in a town called Stawki (Stavky in English), which was near the Dniester River and close to the Romanian border, but Renia adored it just as much as her old home. She loved hearing the birds singing. She loved the wind. She loved the forest. I sometimes think the memories of those places—far away in the country, in another time—are what inspired the poetry she wrote in this diary. Her poems were quiet, peaceful thoughts taken down while she was surrounded by war.

  War isn’t what drove us away from our home in Stawki. I was a child actor, called “the Shirley Temple of Poland,” and in 1938, my mom and I moved to Warsaw to promote me. She left Renia with her parents in her hometown of Przemyśl, a small city in southeastern Poland that is now on the border of Ukraine. In January 1939, Renia began her diary. That summer, I visited Renia and my grandparents for vacation, and my mom went back to Warsaw.

  The German and Soviet armies invaded Poland in September 1939, and by the end of that month, Poland was divided into two zones of occupation: the German side to the west and the Soviet side to the east. Przemyśl spread across both banks of the river San, so it was split in two. My grandparents lived in the eastern, Soviet-occupied part. Our mother was in Warsaw, in the western, German-occupied part of Poland. We were not allowed to cross the San, so we were suddenly cut off from her. That’s when Renia became a surrogate mother to me. We only saw our mom a few times in the next two years, and letters from her didn’t arrive very often. Renia pined for her terribly. To this day, I wonder if this diary was a substitute for the mother she loved and missed so much.

  Until my sister’s boyfriend, Zygmunt, presented this diary to my mom in the early 1950s, I had no idea Renia had kept it. How she’d hidden seven hundred pages from me is a mystery, but it was her secret that she shared only with Zygmunt. Renia left her diary with Zygmunt just before she was killed, and he passed it to someone for safekeeping before he was sent away to the camps. The pages here survived just as he did, and a friend—we still don’t know who—brought them to him in the United States. My mother died in 1969, and when I found the diary in her things, I locked it up in a safe-deposit box in a Chase Bank near my apartment. I couldn’t bear to read it. It was just too emotional for me.

  I’ve still only read a few parts, and they’ve made me sick or made me cry. But I know these pages are important, so I will share them with you. We live in a time when tolerance is sometimes hard to find, but it’s so important. War is also difficult to figure out—especially if you’re in the middle of it—but Renia was always so wise, and she did. I believe her thoughts, her struggles, and her death show us why the world needs peace and acceptance. So, I will let my sister’s words and poems speak for themselves. At the end of the diary, I have written commentary that corresponds with particular entries and times of my life that I remember with my sister. I discuss history and what I recall about the last few years of Renia’s life, and then I tell you how those of us who survived carried on after the war. My memories aren’t as clear as they were eighty years ago, but I do my best. At some points, my thoughts and Renia’s may feel scattered or not linear, but that’s how a diary is. It’s immediate and impulsive, and sometimes my memories are like that, too.

  In the end, I know that my words are the legacy of the life my sister didn’t get to have, while Renia’s are the memories of a youth trapped forever in war.

  —Elizabeth Leszczyńska Bellak, formerly Ariana Spiegel

  JANUARY 31, 1939

  Why did I decide to start my diary today? Did something important happen? Have I discovered that my friends are keeping diaries of their own? No! I just want a friend. I want somebody I can talk to about my everyday worries and joys. Somebody who will feel what I feel, believe what I say and never reveal my secrets. No human could ever be that kind of friend and that’s why I have decided to look for a confidant in the form of a diary.

  Today, my dear Diary, is the beginning of our deep friendship. Who knows how long it will last? It might even continue until the end of our lives. In any case I promise to always be honest with you, I’ll be open and I’ll tell you everything. In return you’ll listen to my thoughts and my concerns, but never ever will you reveal them to anybody else, you’ll remain silent like an enchanted book, locked up with an enchanted key and hidden in an enchanted castle. You won’t betray me, if anything it’ll be those small blue letters that people are able to recognize.

  First of all, allow me to introduce myself. I’m in the third grade of the Maria Konopnicka Middle School for Girls.* My name is Renia, or at least that is what my friends call me. I have a little sister, Arianka,† who wants to be a movie star. (She’s partially fulfilled this dream, as she’s already been in some movies.)

  Our mommy lives in Warsaw. I used to live in a beautiful manor house on the Dniester River. I loved it there. I think these were so far the happiest days of my life. There were storks on old linden trees, apples glistened in the orchard and I had a garden with neat, cha
rming rows of flowers. But that’s in the past now and those days will never return. There is no manor house anymore, no storks on old linden trees, no apples or flowers. All that remain are memories, sweet and lovely. And the Dniester River, which flows, distant, strange and cold—which hums, but not for me anymore.

  Now I live in Przemyśl, at my granny’s house. But the truth is I have no real home. That’s why sometimes I get so sad that I have to cry. I cry, though I don’t miss anything, not the dresses, not sweets, not my strange and precious dreams. I only miss my Mama and her warm heart. I miss the house where we all lived together, like in the white manor house on the Dniester River.

  Again the need to cry takes over me

  When I recall the days that used to be

  The linden trees, house, storks and butterflies

  Far … somewhere … too far for my eyes

  I see and hear what I miss

  The wind that used to lull old trees

  And nobody tells me anymore

  About the fog, about the silence

  The distance and darkness outside the door

  I’ll always hear this lullaby

  See our house and pond laid by

  And linden trees against the sky …

  But I also have joyous moments, and there are so many of them … So many! I need to introduce my class to you, so that you can understand all our inside jokes.

  My best friend, Norka,* sits next to me. Somebody might say that they don’t like Nora, someone else might be delighted with her. I always like Norka, she’s always the same sweet Norka to me. We share all the same thoughts, have the same views and opinions. At our school, the girls often get “crushes” on our teachers, so Norka and I have a crush, a real one (some girls do it just to butter the teachers up) on our Latin teacher, Mrs. Waleria Brzozowska née Brühl. We call her “Brühla.” Brühla is the wife of a handsome officer who lives in Lwów. She goes to see him every other Sunday. We tried to get his address through the address bureau, but didn’t succeed because we don’t know his actual name. (We call him “Zdzisław.”) Brühla teaches Latin and we’re good at this subject, which surely proves that we really love her.